Customer Reviews

One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000

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This short and well written book is a summary of Chinese historical demography from around 1700 to 2000. The authors are particularly concerned with rebutting a naive Malthusian view of Chinese society as governed by unlimited fertility checked only by subsistence crises. As the authors point out also, Malthus' actual analysis was more sophisticated than this simplified version but the naive view has been endorsed by quite a few subsequent scholars. Lee and Wang argue for complex and distinctive Chinese regulation of demographic variables. Embedded within a deeply patriarchal and patrilineal culture, Lee and Wang suggest that poor and elite Chinese families used a combination of female infanticide (and its corollary, favoring male older children), practices that promoted relatively low marital fertility, and production of a relatively high rate of non-reproducing males. These complex and interacting practices, combined with other features such as fictive kinship that allowed families to overcome lack of offspring via adoptions, allowed Chinese families to tailor reproduction to economic circumstances. They assign a relatively small role for famine per se in population control, and emphasis that Chinese population growth has been driven by phenomena observed also in the Western world, including an 18th century population boom perhaps secondary to increased agricultural productivity and expanded farmlands, the application of public health measures in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and the more recent application of modern medical care.

Lee and Wang also suggest that China underwent a distinctive path to demographic transition, the fall in fertility associated with modernization. In Western societies, they emphasize increasing emphasis of personal choice and voluntary drop in fertility. In China, the remarkably rapid demographic transition has been driven by communal and coercive restraints generated by the state and the Party. They argue as well that the transition, however, was facilitated by the Chinese tradition of fertility restraint via communal mechanisms. Some of the detailed discussion of these issues is particularly interesting, especially the description of the baby boom that followed collectization. They also have a very interesting discussion of how these communal restraints on fertility are an example, perhaps the best example, of a real difference in Chinese and Western society.

This book has some unavoidable limitations of which readers should be aware. It was published initially about 10 years ago and parts are a bit dated. Included, for example, is an old prediction that China's population would peak at 1.6 billion at mid-century. A more recent prediction (US Census International Database) is that 2050 will see a Chinese population of about 1.3 billion and be on the decline. Lee and Wang mention that the most prosperous regions of late 18th century China had comparable living standards to prosperous regions of Western Europe. I believe that this has been a controversial point in the scholarly literature related to the origins of the Industrial Revolution and that some economic historians think this incorrect. It also appears that Chinese prosperity was accomplished by labor intensification and agricultural involution, a somewhat different path than 18th century Britain or Holland. Probably because of data limitations, there is relatively little discussion of diachronic differences in pre-modern China. It may be that the 18th century was somewhat different from the 19th century, certainly the latter was characterized by slower Chinese population growth and a number of enormous catastrophes, including the Tai Ping rebellion and the late century famines chronicled by Mike Davis in his Late Victorian Holocausts. While the naive Malthusian view is clearly wrong, it may be that 18th century population growth and environmental degradation produced some semi-Malthusian effects that reduced the safety margin for many regions of China.